Month #6 & #7: Final Two Months

So I'm clearly waaaay behind on my posts about my 7 month budget challenge. I decided not to share with you our spending cause we failed big time. Between our wedding and buying a condo our spending habits were much higher than expected. We never really were able to cut our spending by 10% a month, but we did manage to save money for our wedding.

Overall this was a good exercise in tracking our spending and holding ourselves accountable to where our money was going. Two months into this new year and we have some pretty aggressive savings goals. We would like to save 3000$/mo. What we will use the money for I'm not sure, we have dreams of one day having a restaurant, a few kids, doing more travel....all of which requires money. If we manage to save 3000$/mo for 12 months we will be looking at having 36,000$ saved within a year.

This will also just be another exercise in holding ourselves accountable to our spending. Instead of tracking every dollar that goes in/out, I'm going to just ensure that every month we put in 3000$ into our savings whatever is left on top of that will go towards bills, rent, groceries & spending. If we come up short one month then I'll have to take some out of our savings to pay bills and then the following month I'll try to make that money back.

On average our monthly expenses are 1710$ that includes rent, utilities, groceries, gym memberships. On average our combined pay is 5000$ so it is reasonable to expect to save 3000$/mo while still having some leeway. We will see how successful we are. In the past when I've wanted to save a lot of money it was usually because I was unhappy at home, or I was headed nowhere. This time around I love my life here in Montreal which makes saying no to dinners out, drinks with friends and shopping VERY hard. The sacrifices feel more well like sacrifices. I'll keep you posted about how we going with it, and eventually what we plan to do with the money!

Coming up, finally I have edited my pictures from my trips, I will write my wedding budget out and I'll talk more about trip planning (my favourite!)